The invention relates to a process and apparatus for cleaning and opening loose fiber stock like cotton, synthetic fibers, etc. The fiber material is passed through a feeder and afterwards is subjected to a cleaning operation to be further processed.
It is customary with cleaning means which prepare textile fiber material for cards, etc., to feed the fiber material by means of a chute feed and the like to intake rollers of the opening and cleaning unit. The cleaning unit by itself comprises one or more opening and cleaning rollers which cooperate with knife blades and the like. The cleaned fiber material moves to a collecting chamber from where it is carried away pneumatically. To ensure efficient operation of the cleaning means, samples of the fiber material fed thereto are taken from time to time to test for their extent of contamination. Subject to the degree of contamination, the cleaning means is reset, on the basis that the extent of contamination has changed. The operation is substantially intermittent. The scanning of the sample contamination takes a certain time, and the resetting of cleaning means based on the detected result is somewhat delayed. The degree of contamination of the fiber material subsequently fed may have changed meanwhile producing an unsatisfactory result.
Quality of the cleaned fiber material is considerably affected by this situation and may vary impairing the processing operation at the card.
Accordingly, an object of the invention is to substantially improve and perform more reliably cleaning of textile fiber material and adjust for degree of contamination in preparation for processing the material on a textile card or other textile processing equipment.